TYPO3 Calendar Base’s starttime doesn’t understand years anymore

Today I updated the Calendar Base extension in one of my TYPO3 projects to the current version 1.6. Apparently this version comes with a couple of changes to the TypoScript configurations. I had a lot of problems with the starttime setting in particular.

After I had updated cal to version 1.6 it seemed as if all my events where gone. The list view didn’t show any events anymore. After searching frantically for possible reasons (event import, page setup, and finally extension configuration), I found out that the new version doesn’t understand starttime definitions with a negative year.

# does not work.
plugin.tx_cal_controller.view.list.starttime = -1 year